The Stage Life of Props (review)

Andrew Sofer's The Stage Life of Props expands upon a particular genre of late-modern academic writing: the history of drama based on play analysis. This involves the articulation of a specific theoretical approach to text-based theatre, and then a study of historical playtexts (and more lately, other primary sources), which becomes a cumulative history of a particular range of drama. Sofer's book follows the same path, but by focusing on the performance of props, he seeks to widen the range of raw data from which we can imagine the nature of Western drama from the Middle Ages to the present.

The Stage Life of Props is insightful and often delightful when it tells us what was going on with the Eucharist wafer in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; the bloody handkerchief in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; the skull in English Renaissance drama (not only in Hamlet but as a persistent trope in plays by Dekker and Tour-neur); the dizzyingly complex semiotics of the fan in Restoration drama; and the pistol, from 19th-century melodrama to the post-Beckett plays of Maria Irene Fornes. Sofer's comfortable command of a wide range of material plus his practical insights (he is also a director) make this material of immediate value to the-atremakers who want to know what their props represent and how they can be used in production.

Sofer articulates his theoretical approach by posing two possible methodologies offered by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (1985):"production analysis" and "performance analysis." The former focuses on "actual, historical productions of particular plays," while the latter "concentrates on visualization of performance possibilities" (4). Sofer sees himself as a "text-based performance critic," but rules out the possibilities of "performance analysis" in the context of historic dramas, stating that The Stage Life of Props will instead rely upon the creative speculation of production analysis and its imaginative interpretation of stage directions and character dialogue. In other words, while Sofer wants to categorically expand the limits of theatre history as the study of playtexts by examining the use of props, in fact his methodology reinforces those limits by relying primarily on the same playtexts to understand how objects work in performance.

Sofer reviews preexisting performing object theory, but discounts the most cohesive 20th-century studies of object performance—the Prague School contributions of Petr Bogatyrev, Jiří Veltruský, and Jindřich Honzl—as marked by "confusion" (14) and leading to "impasse" (11) because they are based on linguistics alone, and thus lose track of the "materiality" of the object (14). With a nod to Bert O. States, Sofer proposes to reintroduce the phenomenological factor to the study of performing objects, and thus, in fact, "extend" the Prague School project (20). But Sofer commits the error he sees in Prague School theory by basing his analysis of props primarily upon stage directions and dialogue. Sofer writes in that special tense dear to literary criticism: the imaginary theatrical present. In this tense the playwright's dialogues, monologues, and stage directions are posited as objective fact and a performed reality, not simply indicators of the dramatist's desire. This difference is a difficult challenge for theatre history, but certainly one that needs to be acknowledged and problematized rather than minimized or elided. Whatever the limits of the Prague School theorists, their valorization of actual performance marked an advance in theatre theory. Sofer's argument—albeit with some significant exceptions—relies upon a method that eschews the messiness of actual performance for the sureties of literary criticism.

The exceptions include Sofer's thoroughly enlightening tour-de-force analysis of the fan on the Restoration stage, and this is in part because he skillfully draws upon other sources beyond the playtexts. Similarly, in Sofer's analyses of the Eucharist wafer and Christ's shroud in medieval theatre, the paucity of dramatic texts in comparison to other sources allows him...